Game Finds Itself Needing Home Run

When you think of the great matchups in baseball history, you tend to think of Ty Cobb vs. Walter Johnson, Ruth vs. Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell vs. Dizzy Dean, Gibson vs. Seaver, Koufax vs. Mays, Drysdale vs. Aaron.

How about Ravitch vs. Fehr?

The World Series or a pennant was often at stake in those other confrontations.

Baseball itself may be the stake in this one.

The proposition before these guys is, is the game doomed? Are we seeing the Last days of Pompeii here? Is baseball once again the Sick Man of Sport?

TV sent shock waves through the grand old game this year when it announced that it had taken a $580-million bath in its $1.6-billion package.

Now, half a billion is a big ante to lose in one pot. Michael Jordan couldn’t handle that. Neither could CBS.

So, the game has had to take a good hard look at itself. What we might be seeing here is goodby to the good old three-strikes-yer-out, take-me-out-to-the-ball-game, Casey-at-the-Bat part of American nostalgia. Where-did-everybody-go? may be in the future. There-was-a-ballpark-right-here lament.

Dick Ravitch and Donald Fehr might be dueling for the survival of the game as we know it and love it.

Ravitch is a right-handed pitcher representing the baseball Establishment, the ownership, the big business of baseball. Fehr is a left-handed hitter, a labor leader who represents the union, the players.

They met in debate at the 20th annual Associated Press Sports Editors convention this week. And to survive, Dandy Dick Ravitch told the editors, the game has to come to terms with what he calls “a state of perpetual war” between owners and athletes. “I have never seen two worlds as hostile to each other as the players and owners. Players and owners just do not want to work together to market this game even though they are joined at the hip like Siamese twins. If one dies, they both die.”

They, not tennis, are the real “Balkans of sport.”

Ravitch sees the problem in terms of the inefficiency of elementary bookkeeping on the part of the owners. “Baseball is the only business that sets its prices before it knows what its payroll will be. It’s the only business which cannot bargain collectively for wages, hours and working conditions.”

He deplores the fact that his clients “pay too much for teams, pay too much for the players and wonder why they’re going broke. Whatever their motives--ego, civic pride, desire to be recognized--they overpay for their business, then overpay their employees. As recently as 1990, the owners paid 41% of their gross revenue for their work force. By 1993, it had jumped to 61%, and this during a period of revenue decline.”

Fehr, the only trade unionist in history with a constituency of millionaires, does not take this with his bat on his shoulder.

“Baseball is simply not very well organized,” he counters. “Cartels--and baseball is a cartel--encourage inefficiency.

“Baseball is a monopoly and doesn’t have competitive pressure. And you would not have the owners of any other business trying to operate without a chief executive officer, but baseball has for years now. Fay Vincent was not effective as commissioner in his last few months and, of course, we don’t have any commissioner at all anymore.”

Both adversaries agree baseball’s problem is the inequity of small-market teams trying to compete with big-market teams. (It was ever thus: In 1934, the New York Yankees drew 81,000 people to a single doubleheader. The same year, the St. Louis Browns drew 80,000 for the whole season.)

“There is a 350% differentiation between what a big-market team can command in subsidiary revenues and what a small-market team can,” Ravitch says. “Player compensation becomes a big factor when you have to spend 80% of your revenue on gross compensation to players.”

Then, he loaded one up and sent it sailing at Fehr’s head. “TV,” he warned, “is looking to other sports, other forms of entertainment to sell its product. Baseball is being perceived as being watched by people who are too old, too white and too rich.”

So, is the game then moribund? Can it survive if TV abandons it on the United States’ doorstep with a note on its chest?

Fehr scoffs. “No one takes the headline ‘Will Baseball Survive?’ seriously,” he retorts.

Then, Ravitch unloaded the curve. San Diego recently has shocked baseball by apparently systematically dismantling its operation and selling off its best players at liquidation prices. They let Gary Sheffield, a near-Triple-Crown player last year, go for a rookie relief pitcher and two minor leaguers just to get rid of his $3.5-million salary. They even threw in a left-handed pitcher.

“Take the San Diego story,” Ravitch said. “Here you have a group of men who made money in the entertainment business, in an era when the banks would lend you money to make the purchase, and they bought the San Diego Padres for $75 to $80 million. Theirs was not a profit motive, they just wanted to have some fun. But then, they got into competition for players eligible for arbitration, and the percentage of gross revenue that went for player compensation went so high that they lost $12 million cash out of pocket last year. Now, they can continue to subsidize the team as a charity--or they can cut costs.

“Meanwhile, the war between the small-market teams and the big-market teams is going to intensify. The big-market owners say, ‘Why should I give my revenue away?’ ”

Fehr fouls off the pitch. “Arbitration is a red herring,” he insists. “If an owner wants to get rid of arbitration, all he has to do is make the player a free agent. The reason they don’t is that it is cheaper to arbitrate.”

In the final analysis, you would have to say Ravitch walked him. But it took what the players call a “good at-bat.”

“The notion of survival is not a question really,” Fehr insists.

That’s what those other dinosaurs thought.